Raiffeisen Day: Free entrance exclusively for Raiffeisen customers

Sunday, 10 Dec, 2017 10:00 to 18:00

Raiffeisen supports culture and offers all Raiffeisen customers some precious moments in the Jewish Museum Vienna.On presentation of a valid Raiffeisen cash card you and a companion can visit both Jewish Museum sites free of charge.

Tour program:

11 a.m. – Beauty meets history (Museum Judenplatz)

Accompany the beauty pioneer Helena Rubinstein with us as she overcomes continents and breaks conventions. The current temporary exhibition leads you through space and time from Kraków to Vienna, via Melbourne to London, Paris, and all the way to New York and Tel Aviv. You simultaneously experience cosmetics, art and architectural history, and get to know an extraordinary woman with an extravagant taste. Her beauty empire also bore her name from the 1920s onwards, grew rapidly, and had 100 branches in 14 countries with around 30,000 employees at the time of her death in 1965.

In the scope of our tour, we will also take a look “under” Judenplatz and therefore into the Viennese Jewish community in the Middle Ages.

2 p.m. – We celebrate Chanukah (Museum Dorotheergasse)

This year the Jewish Chanukah festival begins on December 13. There is still a little time to design really cool candle holders yourself—made of unusual materials and to take home with you. On our (certainly not boring) family tour you will find out what Chanukah means, what happened more than 2000 years ago at the Temple in Jerusalem and why this festival is celebrated. During our museum expedition we will look for ALL candle holders in the museum—and even play dreidel casino, where something can naturally be won as well.

3 p.m. – Israel before Israel (Museum Dorotheergasse)

Ze’ev Aleksandrowicz was a Zionist and a passionate photographer. Born in 1905 in Kraków as the son of a paper wholesaler, he also lived briefly in Vienna as a student. Numerous journeys led him to European countries and, in the mid-1930s, once around the world.

Between 1932 and 1935 he traveled three times to Palestine. Tel Aviv, the first modern Jewish city founded in 1909, exerted a particular fascination on him. Aleksandrowicz took pictures of European immigrants as well as Arabs, ocean liners, camels and the construction sites of the just-emerging architecture of the modernist “White City.” We join him on his trip and combine this with interesting objects from Palestine, the Holy Land and the State of Israel, which are exhibited in the museum’s accessible depot.

The Russian revolution called for “Peace, Land and Bread” and its impact went far beyond the Russian borders. In many countries worldwide—including Austria—Jews began to fight for the equality of all human beings. They were all dreaming of paradise on earth. Close relations between Austrian and Russian Marxists arose in the process. Often it was Jewish Communists who mediated between these two worlds. The historic events in both countries are observed on the levels of diplomacy, politics, society and art: From Leo Trotsky’s exile in Vienna, to the October Revolution, to the demise of the Soviet Union.